The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization has been conducting workshops, asking about people’s ability to pay for health insurance, and unsurprisingly they’re finding that folks of limited means may well be impoverished by the personal mandate:
The interfaith organization made its case with data from a survey it conducted of 367 people with low and moderate incomes who attended the group’s workshops and shared details of their income and expenses. The information is the first on what state residents can afford, but it’s unclear whether the results are representative of the Commonwealth. Most of the people had insurance, but many were at risk of losing it because of unstable job situations.
Nearly one-half of those with incomes low enough to qualify for state-subsidized insurance did not have enough discretionary income to afford the monthly premiums, which range from $18 to $106 for an individual, the survey found.
Nearly 40 percent of those with incomes between 300 and 500 percent of the poverty level could not afford the $380 per month premium plus out-of-pocket costs discussed by state officials last week. Several state officials said they hoped to bring that cost closer to $250 per month, but the survey found that 28 percent of those eligible could not afford that lower cost either.
Bethany Farrell of Watertown is among those surveyed who wants insurance but cannot afford it. The 22-year-old earns about $1,200 a month as a part-time assistant at a Boston auction house and does not qualify for work-based insurance. Paying for rent, food, student loans, and other expenses eats up her salary, she said. She has no way to pay the $70-per-month subsidized premium she qualifies for and worries about the impending penalty.
“I don’t like being punished for something I can’t afford,” she said, adding that the mandate to buy insurance may force her to leave the state. [my emphasis]
Now, I doubt GBIO’s survey was scientific. Are its anecdotal results intuitively believable? Heck yes.
I suspect that GBIO will get what it wants, and the personal mandate will come with a big doughnut hole for folks making just over $30,000. But for them, then what? ER care and the free care pool?
why didn’t the state just expand MassHealth coverage to cover more poor people instead of creating an expensive new layer of bureacracy and fragmentation called the “Connector” that mainly exists to funnel more dollars to the private insurance industry? In the words of Bob Kuttner, an economist and health policy expert
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I hope folks, particularly GBIO and Co., will think about coming to hear Kuttner speak on this topic at MassCare’s annual Ben Gill Award event at Rile’s Jazz Club in Cambridge on Sat. March 17.
Have the terms “pre-emptive” actions not sunk in yet? Requiring people to buy health insurance benefits who. The medical industry. If people stop going to doctors then big pharma losses out on their profit margins. The very same big pharma companies who won the right of direct to consumer advertizing. What right does government have to tell me I HAVE to buy insurance. Sorry, but that is fascism.
What right does government have to tell you that you have to BUY insurance.
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A government “mandate” for health care insurance really only works if you are automatically covered in some way, by taxpayer-funded health care.
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In other words, if you do nothing, pay nothing in premiums (out of pocket) you have some sort of universal coverage. Now, some of your taxes from your paycheck (and everyone else’s, AND from corporate taxation) goes towards this automatic insurance. That’s called putting everyone into the risk pool. However, to mandate you pay above and beyond from your own discretionary funds for a health care premium is a very dangerous thing for those people on the edge of poverty (or, say, a middle class person losing their job and being unemployed!).
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I’m fine with a mandate, but only if the default is that coverage itself is automatic and fairly paid for.
There is clearly some problem with the definition of poverty level if people making three times the poverty level can’t cut $300/month from their expenses. That is a cut that is less than what it would take to put them at twice the poverty level. Which means that most people don’t think they could afford to live at two times the poverty level. Shouldn’t the poverty level be around where most people would say they just barely couldn’t afford to pay all their bills even if they cut all their expenses as much as possible? Which would mean anyone above the poverty level could in theory cut their expenses (though probably only by lowering their standard of living). People at three times the poverty level should have no problem finding $300/month to cut. Who do we have to convince that poverty level needs to be redefined?
the poverty rate IS set too low.
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I’m looking at our own family income, two adults, no kids, and the act of buying a house. I’m telling you, we’d have to double (or more) what we’re paying in rent in order to buy even a smallish house in a mediocre neighborhood where I live, really hurting us financially. And yet by every standard by which people can get down payment assistance or other help from city/state/federal government, we make too much to qualify. And usually those standards for first time home buyers are far above (read: 200% or more) the actual poverty level.